The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) guarantees employees with job protection and up to 12 weeks leave for family and medical leave per year. Although this act is nationwide, it is unpaid.

Only 9 states in the United States provide Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) for up to 4 weeks -12 weeks of paid leave, varying from state to state. New York is fortunate enough to one of the nine states that have paid family leave (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington).

Similar to the FMLA, PFML only applies to employers with 50 or employees, but only some states offer job-protection like FMLA. In New York state, eligible employees of Paid Family Leave (PFL) can get up to 12 weeks of paid family leave, job protection, and keep their health insurances on the same terms as when they were working. Their weekly PFL benefit will be 67% of their average weekly wages, and PFL benefits are capped at 67% of New York State’s average weekly of $2,000 which will be $971.61.

Although New York’s PFL is one of the best compared to Rhode Island’s 4 week paid family leave, it fails to effectively support children of single parents. As of currently, New York’s PFL is disbursed on an individual bases, meaning mothers will get their own portion for PFL and fathers will get their own portion for PFL. Single parents only get half the support of PFL because they are the only parent to the child. 

According to CDC data report “Births: Final Data for 2019”, out of 3,747,540 births, 40% were births to unmarried mothers, which is more or less 1,499,016 births were births to unmarried parents. When separated by race, out of all births from black mothers 70% were unmarried and out of all births from Hispanic mothers 52.1% were unmarried, compared to 28.2% of all births from white mothers were unmarried. It is important to note this because it is the populations that are most disadvantaged that are unmarried and unable to fully benefit from PFL.

The statistics also show for the past decade out of all the births, births to unmarried parents have been around 40%. This is not new and single parents should not be forced to choose between work or care for their child because of a systemic flaw. Single parents are at higher risk of work-poverty and depression.

The proposal to remedy this is if the single parent’s parents or the child’s grandparents will take part in take care of the child, the child’s grandparents can apply to get the unaccounted mother’s or father’s portion. This way, single parents are able to get the same amount of support to a family with both parents present.

Another proposal to address this issue is to extend the paid parental leave period for the single parent. Similar to Finland, single parents are entitled to take the amount of parental leave for both parents (164 days/per parent, 328 days for a single parent). Regardless of method, PFL needs to make changes to better serve single parents as they do with 2 parent families.